Believing Legacy Gatekeepers Will Fail To Adapt Is Not The Same As Wanting Them To Fail

from the important-distinctions dept

Years back, I wrote a blog post called "Why I Hope the RIAA Succeeds." I got a lot of flack for it, because many people here seem to think that groups like the RIAA and MPAA should fail. I feel quite the opposite. I don't want them to fail at all. I think that they are failing, and I'm hoping that they wake up, pay heed to what we (and the wider public) are telling them, and adapt to a changing world full of opportunities. What I dislike is not the RIAA or the MPAA itself. But the strategies those groups employ, which I believe, quite strongly, are self-defeating and harmful to the public and the creative folks they claim to represent.

Still, many people assume that I hate these groups and want them to fail.

Author Barry Eisler, who has been in the news lately for turning down a half-a-million dollar deal from a traditional publisher to instead self-publish (and more recently, for signing a deal directly with Amazon, allowing him a sort of hybrid model between publisher and self-publishing), has been taking some similar heat lately as well. He wrote a guest post for Joe Konrath's blog, in which he discussed the nature of the legacy publishing business (short hand: "New York," just as people refer to "Hollywood" when discussing the legacy movie business), which he doesn't think is handling the digital transition particularly well -- especially compared to Amazon.

In response, many people accused him of hating "New York" and wanting those publishers to fail. In a followup post, Eisler does a nice job clarifying his position and explaining why wanting an institution (or group of them) to change and believing their current path is destined to fail, is not the same thing as wanting them to fail:

Now, if you ask me to bet on the likelihood that New York will successfully adapt to the advent of digital and the emergence of Amazon as a publisher, I would have to regretfully decline to bet very much. As I noted in my previous post, companies coddled by a lack of competition get flabby, and New York, which hasn't faced real competition in living memory, is now squaring off against a formidable competitor indeed. I don't think it's likely legacy publishers will be able to adapt and survive. And though I hope I'm wrong about that, my hope doesn't lead me to want to protect New York from competition, either.

Maybe I'm clarifying here more than is really necessary, but I've learned from recent experience how willing and even eager people can be to mischaracterize arguments they find threatening. So again: the fact that I'm predicting an outcome doesn't mean I'm hoping for it. I predict that one day I will be dead, but that doesn't render me particularly enamored of or eager for that outcome. Similarly, though I don't think New York's chances are good, come on, guys, I'm cheering you on. I want you to step up, not give up.

Indeed. That is very much the way I feel about the legacy music and movie businesses. I'm a huge fan of movies, music and books. I would love for all those industries to continue to be as successful as possible, but that requires adapting, and, like Barry, I just don't see many of those legacy players doing a very good job adapting. But that doesn't mean I want them to fail, or even dislike them. I just wish they'd stop trying to muck up the rest of the world while they attempt to figure all of this out.

Reader Comments

You want them to accept piracy, except it is absolutely impossible to have real and true price discovery until there is some sort of standard piracy enforcement.

A free-for-all internet full of illegal activity was never going to go on forever; it's silly to believe such a thing was going to continue ad infinitum in a society; that's not how societies function.

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You want them to accept piracy, except it is absolutely impossible to have real and true price discovery until there is some sort of standard piracy enforcement.

The MPAA has been fighting piracy since they lost control of studios through the Supreme Court. They've fought against the VCR, the mp3 player, the DVD recorder, the DeCSSS standard, regionalization, and now, the internet. There is no need for a standard piracy enforcement. It's time for them to accept the reality that no one can turn back the clock to the 1980s.

A free-for-all internet full of illegal activity was never going to go on forever; it's silly to believe such a thing was going to continue ad infinitum in a society; that's not how societies function.

Societies function if everyone can respect the laws followed. Copyright makes no sense and is not respected even within the US. Why should others take it seriously around the globe for two small trade industries?

It is impossible to take you seriously until you admit to that.

No, it's impossible to listen to an AC that writes this drivel when he doesn't understand the internet himself. If you can't figure out how to make money, stop competing and get a new job. Else, you look more and more like a Luddite.

I think a lot of us don't really care whether they succeed or fail. The problem is that their wildly flailing around incompetently is hurting a lot of us. So given that fact, it would be better if they failed fast so we could move on with our lives.

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"Real and true price discovery" must not be terribly important for business success, then, given all the case studies we see here where non-DRM, non-litigious (sometimes even pay-what-you-want, how's that for price discovery?) strategies make tidy profits. So who cares about it?

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*sigh*

You want them to accept piracy, except it is absolutely impossible to have real and true price discovery until there is some sort of standard piracy enforcement.

Did you know that Record Labels used to have to deal with the scourge of vinyl records breaking during shipment. I think, as I'm sure would you, that they should have dumped billions of dollars into fighting against physics. However, they took the coward's road and decided that breaking vinyl records was just a fact of life, and they actually planned on it happening. What a bunch of broadbrush wielding freetards, right?

A free-for-all internet full of illegal activity was never going to go on forever; it's silly to believe such a thing was going to continue ad infinitum in a society; that's not how societies function.

I know you're willfully ignorant, but I'm going to address you as if you aren't.

The problem isn't that the "internet [is] full of illegal activity". If that were true, governments would just shut it down and be done with it. The problem is that the internet is full of activity, and some of it is illegal. To complicate the matter, when dealing with copyright infringement, it is difficult to sort through the activity to find the illegal stuff without either breaking how the internet functions, or violating everyone's privacy. To make it even *more* difficult, even if you could see what everyone was doing on the internet, there is no difference between an infringing mp3 and a legal one.

Furthermore, the internet is filled with people who are much smarter than the people who would like to see the internet broken, when it comes to technology. Also, the people who want to break the internet are *far* outnumbered by the people who wish to see it remain as it is.

All this adds up to the simple fact that it is actually quite silly to believe that there will be any "taming" of the internet to support business models, outdated or otherwise.

It is impossible to take you seriously until you admit to that.

Yeah, I'm sure Mike is kept up at night because of the fact that some too-ashamed-of-her-own-opinion-to-put-any-identifier-on-it lady on the internet doesn't take him seriously.

JUST AS I'VE SAID THEN: you're a corporatist!

How many times have I said that Mike is NOT against the corporations, just thinks they're doing it all wrong. How many times has he mentioned that his focus is /all/ on tapping revenue streams? -- WELL, here he /admits/ it! Can I get a high five for being RIGHT? -- Or are you guys going to swallow yet another "limited hangout" revealing of his true purposes?

Remember, Mike is from the Ivy League, where technicians are trained how to /manage/ the economy to best interests of the ruling class. -- He's pretty near being in the 1%, and is definitely not with working people, from all evidence.

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Then they shouldn't be surprised when the customers they fail to serve find alternate channels of procurement. Providers can either adapt to the market and serve those customers [a win-win], or they can throw a hissyfit, convolute the law, and stamp out civil liberties as collateral damage, all for no concomitant economic gain as the pirates adapt to the changes far more quickly than the obstinate legacy players. And the braindead thing is that they seem to choose the latter every time.

Re: NASCAR

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That's the point - they're making the choice to NOT release it in a format the customer wants, so the customer becomes a pirate.

All we've been asking for is to get content in a form that's convenient for us. CDs are not convenient and haven't been for years. It's like saying the only way we'll correspond is through snail mail.

They resisted mp3s for years because they thought it would encourage widespread piracy, even though it was the lack of legal mp3s that lead to widespread piracy. Apple finally forced them to change their ways, and now Apple sells millions of legal mp3s. People are paying.

I pay for Netflix every month. Why would I pirate anything that's streaming on Netflix? The only thing I would consider pirating is stuff I can't get any other way, because the copyright holders decide plastic discs is the only way to go.

Re: JUST AS I'VE SAID THEN: you're a corporatist!

Why should you get a high five for Mike revealing what he believes in?
Besides, you never did say it yourself. Ever. Hundreds of your comments contain the words "Pirate Mike" or "Freetard". That does not sound anything like "Mike is just against what the corporations do".

I personally want them to fail after proposing some rather draconian power grabs that sacrifice freedom AND security in favor of their profits. ACTA was more than enough to kill what little redemption they had left. Why should they get any more chances when they can't even get the Constitution or "supply and demand" right?

Mike sez: "I don't want the [RIAA and MPAA] to fail at all."

>>> "... many people here seem to think that groups like the RIAA and MPAA should fail. I feel quite the opposite. I don't want them to fail at all."

HUH? After almost daily attacks on RIAA and MPAA, Mike now says THAT? He's accused them at the least of conspiring with gov't to get six strikes from ISPs, and now the horrors of SOPA. -- And his purpose all along was to /prolong/ those organizations and /increase/ their income?

Are you fanboys going to wake up at last? I think Mike does as Rush Limbaugh said of the Clinton administration: wakes up in the morning and asks how can I fool 'em today?

At the very least, it must now be clear to even the dullest that Mike doesn't share your goals.

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Right on, brother. It's the same entitlement mentality that those damn dirty VCR owners had back in the '80s; who the hell did they think they were, choosing to watch programs when it was convenient to them? It's the entertainment industry's choice to air programming at certain hours, and viewers should have to live with it. All contrary viewpoints reek of entitlement mentality, like those spoiled brats on the Supreme Court.

Re: JUST AS I'VE SAID THEN: you're a corporatist!

OOTB, I've been trying to figure you out for awhile now.

As far as I can tell, you don't like it when a business is too large (Big Search!) or too small (you're not innovating, you grifters!).

You obviously think a lot of education is bad (College Boy!) and I have seen you criticize others for having uninformed opinions or incorrect grammar. (But seem to ignore everyone telling you that your /brackets/ look really, really stupid.)

So I have come to the conclusion that you are really Goldilocks in disguise and prefer that your chair, bed and porridge be "just right" also.

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Well, since no one (not even you) can actually give those numbers, we have to do our best with a process of elimination.

Netflix alone uses 32.7% of all internet traffic in the world. That's grown from the 20% I read not all that long ago.

I'm looking for more percentages, but it's hard to find. I found something about iTunes using 14%, but I think that may have just been how many internet users have it (though that number seems a little low).

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I'm not sure how you managed to so epically contradict yourself there, but indeed you did.

Hey Bucko, that's your sentence that you choose to say "everyone is respecting the law" then incorrectly state copyright is doing just that. Copyright is not doing anything to help society in its current iteration except limiting access to legal materials. But I'd love to see how you claim "it's only about rogue sites" or "it's only about foreign liability" when that's been show to be a lie over and over. But go ahead, you keep bringing it up, I'll calmly show the examples that you're lying.

Copyright is most certainly respected by the vast amount of people in the US.

Don't make me laugh. Obviously, you don't realize how many people don't buy games filled with DRM or how vilified Securom is in the game realm. How about how successful Ultralight is over Bluray or the DVD as people move to internet streaming? Better yet, let's make it simpler for you. The NFL tries to have regions set up that people can watch games for only certain teams. It's harder to watch the Atlanta Falcons in Los Angelos UNLESS they're playing the Raiders. The internet erases this barrier. Of all of the claims that maximalists make, to think that copyright is respected is pretty laughable when evidence suggests fair use exceptions do much better than copyright central industries.

That you choose to break the law does not make you correct on the issue or the majority.

Odds are, if the companies better served their customers instead of vilifying the entire internet, they'd do much better. Their strategy of trying to control everything is a lost cause. People have found great alternatives to what they're selling which includes, games, webisodes, music and art not MPAA or RIAA controlled. How long until the companies die? Dunno, but it's rapidly approaching time to embrace the internet instead of fighting the ghost that is piracy.

Re: Mike sez: "I don't want the [RIAA and MPAA] to fail at all."

What the hell are you going on about, guy? It's becoming obvious that you don't even understand what we're hoping for. If, tomorrow, the MPAA and the RIAA pulled a Rick Perry and said "oops!" and decided to stop trying to prevent piracy at any cost, and instead worked to give customers what they want and help artists reach more fans and make money from their art, I would be very happy. I would once again give them my money for their products. (assuming they started making things worth my money!)

Do you think Techdirt is an anti-corporation blog? Holy shit. You're paid to come here by someone that thinks this is an anti-corporation blog, aren't you? Hahahahaha! Man, your employer is wasting a lot of money.

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You're talking about something that was legal for centuries and then was made illegal.

Not the case here. The analogy doesn't work.

The analogy works just fine. As The Infamous Joe pointed out, copyright laws have only existed for 300 years or so and go against thousands of years of human nature. The only reason it's becoming more of an issue now than it was 200 years ago, is because the technology to actually copy at wholesale levels is now available and affordable to the ordinary person.

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Even if the average Joe doesn't understand what's going on with copyright yet, he will soon. Yesterday one of my customers asked me why they couldn't play a Blu Ray that they purchased. Turns out they needed a firmware update to their player. They asked why, I explained DRM. I was told that DRM was stupid, and they should be able to play what they bought without "jumping through a million hoops".

Re: NASCAR

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The problem with those "studies" is that can create the outcome you want by limiting what data gets added to the study. There is no way that 95% of the music downloads are illegal. I download music all the time from 100% free and legal sites without all the pesky DRM crap.

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IFPI - digital pirates are more likely to buy music than average music goers.

In their annual Digital Music Report, IFPI states that file-sharers are half as likely to buy physical CDs than the average music buyer. Although the report is about digital music, they carefully avoid saying anything about file-sharers and digital sales. That would actually show a completely different picture as we will explain below.

The music group made this statement based on an IFPI-commissioned study that was executed by Jupiter research. Although IFPI refused to share the entire research report with TorrentFreak, we can conclude the following from the two pages that were published online.

Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…

* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.

These figures (as reported by the music industry) clearly show that file-sharers buy more digital music than the average music buyer. In fact, the group that makes up the music buyers category actually includes the buying file-sharers, so the difference between music sharers and non-sharing music buyers would be even more pronounced.

How can this be true and why was there no mention of this in the Digital Music Report? They must be spending less on digital music then, right? But again, this is not the case at all. On average, file-sharers actually spend more than non-sharing music buyers. At least that’s what Mark Mulligan, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research who conducted the study for IFPI told us.

And because you need more proof that pirates pay for music, let's look at Hadopi.

If piracy is a sampling and discovery tool for high spenders, then suppressing piracy could depress legal sales. If–as I’ll argue at more length in a subsequent post–we’re in a mostly zero-sum market in which consumers are maxed out on discretionary media expenditures, then enforcement won’t significantly expand but at best just cannibalize one media sector for another.

So, if people argue that piracy is a zero sum game, they've got it wrong. There's two articles that disagree and more research suggesting that piracy leads to more sales, not less.

Why they should fail

-They cannot adapt.
-They cheat the people that create their content.
-They cheat their customers and think of them as criminals.
-They corrupt our political system.
-The collateral damage to the rest of society they are causing.

In short, they are unethical to the core in nearly every way you can think of.

While I'm sure there are reasons I missed, that's a few.

Mike, I'm not accusing you of it, but I do think there's just a hint of moral relativism in your view. If you really honestly believe, and have some good reason for believing, that these organizations can become good and upstanding members of society, then that's great. But I don't see it. I cannot think of any circumstances in which that can happen. So for the betterment of society, I think these organizations should fail, and need to fail. I would prefer they fail quickly, so that they stop causing damage to others in their death throes.

It is entirely possible to run a successful company ethically, and to make money doing it. No one is perfect, but that must be a core value built into the business. These groups seem to have dishonesty built into them. The most useful thing I can see coming from these guys, is as a case study for the next generation of corporate leaders, a bit like like Enron.

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No, CDs are not convenient. If you pay any attention at all to the evolution of consumer electronics, you know that CD and DVD drives are on their way out. Smartphones - no optical drives. Netbooks - no optical drives. iPad - no optical drive. MacBook air - no optical drive, and its days are clearly numbered in the laptop market as they get thinner and lighter. Devices with CD/DVD drives' days are numbered.

Re: Why they should fail

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Remember, that there is such a thing as "corporate bias" which occurs when a company funds a particular study (see, for example, old tobacco studies where it was given a clean bill of health effects, so to speak, or cocaine, which was originally used in Cola Cola).

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> Do you own a computer with a cd/dvd drive?

Fewer and fewer come that way, especially laptops. And I also own a VHS player. It's in a crate in the crawl space, and I haven't bought a VHS tape in 15 years. Something about the convenience, I guess.

This is where we disagree Mike. I WANT them to fail. If they fail now, they won't be around to freak out at the next big tech that threatens their current business model. It gets old listening to them whine.

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it's impossible to take ANY argument seriously, that doesn't accept one basic fact: Piracy is not going to go away. right, wrong, irrelevant. accept that one basic fact...and maybe there's room for discussion. In the meantime, content industry's are dragging us into an orwellian nightmare in an attempt to deny reality.

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"It's their music and it's their choice and right to release it the way they want to. Not yours. Sorry."

CDs and DVDs are inconvenient, unattractive formats.

That means that as long as that is all they offer they will not get my money.

Whether I buy some other songs that are available in high quality DRM free mp3s, or if I pirate the songs I want or spend the money on something else like books or games instead does not impact their bottom line one cent.

They "lost" my sale when they did not offer an attractive product.

There are so many other things to spend money on today. Why would I buy a DVD when I can get half a dozen books for the same money? Or a quality game that provides dozens of hours of entertainment?

In service management they teach you that a service is worth only as much as the customer percieves it is worth. Your costs and work have nothing to do with how much you can charge for it.

So yeah, its their choice to get my money or not. And currently they choose "not". And then they get pissed over it.

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DRM is not the character of those corporations is, copyright and its ridiculous long term (life + 95 years) is, the scope of copyright is.

I can respect a guy who plays a gig in a nightclub or stadium, he earned what he makes there, but someone trying to stop music or videos from flowing because he believes he has a right to no, those people can go pound sand.

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As others pointed out his analogy works just fine, even more when one realizes that "piracy" has been going for hundreds of years and that only after the 80's it became "problematic" to some people, more even if you count that the original copyright statuted didn't include music or movies those where later put on, even more so if you realize that music hasn't been protected for hundreds of years maybe a hundred years.

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Not even 25%? in what world would you close anything that has a 80% rate of legal uses? only in your disturbed world of course.

About music and the 95%, even if it is true I read that like, 95% of water consumption is free, the other 5% is left for companies to try and make a buck, the public space is for the public not for you people.

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"It's their music and it's their choice and right to release it the way they want to."

It's also my choice not to buy it. I wouldn't mind listening to a Led Zep album, but I've never done so. I might do so when they're released digitally, maybe check them out via Spotify. I might even like them enough to buy the albums later. But, there's no way in hell I'm blind-buying their albums, and I'm not a pirate, so I might never listen to them and choose to listen to other bands who do release digitally.

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True, that's one concession they made to the free market - after fragmenting and nearly destroying the market for digital contrent with DRM of course. But, robbing from the public domain, regional and format restrictions and refusing to service niche markets (e.g. the FLAC crowd) are very much still alive.

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Why don't you prove that they're accurate?

The first is just a blog reporting on a press release, no methodology presented, no sources, just an assertion of a "fact" that's clearly presented by a biased party. Isn't that what you normally criticise Mike for?

The second at least links to the primary source, but it's lacking. The title of the paper is "An Estimate of Infringing Use of the Internet". ESTIMATE, not facts. Yet, even their methodology seems flawed without full data. For example, they say that of BT traffic they found "4.2% was software – all of which was copyrighted and shared illegitimately" - separate from games, as that's a different category in their study. Yet, if I look at today's top applications on TPB, I see numerous freeware applications such as VLC and packs of drivers. I find it extremely unlikely that 100% of the traffic they monitored was pirated as they claim, but they provide no way to confirm this. Very poor.

Re: Mike sez: "I don't want the [RIAA and MPAA] to fail at all."

"After almost daily attacks on RIAA and MPAA, Mike now says THAT?"

Yes, I can see how you're confused. This is what intelligent people call a reasoned position.

Mike thinks that the **AAs have every right to exist and deserve to succeed in business if they make the right decisions. However, they have been making horrible decisions that threaten not only their own industries, but threaten to take out others as collateral damage as well. It's these decisions he's been attacking, not the right of the organisations themselves to exist.

But, I can see how you're confused in that black and white, slashy filled world of yours. Join us over here in reality, it's much more interesting.

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But, there's no way in hell I'm blind-buying their albums, and I'm not a pirate, so I might never listen to them and choose to listen to other bands who do release digitally.

It seems like piracy would actually help them make more money by getting more exposure, and the lost sales are due to not serving customers, not because of piracy. But that can't be right can it? Nah, must be the dirty freetards' fault.

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What percentage of Internet traffic is illegal?

In what other part of society has something with that amount of illegal behavior been allowed to continue forever?

Wait, earlier you said copyright is accepted by almost everyone in the US, and now you say a huge percentage of internet traffic is illegal? So that means that's all happening outside the US right - non-US servers serving non-US users (because almost everyone in the US respects copyright). So what do you hope to accomplish by enacting laws about it in the US?